The ruling was the result of an appeal filed by lawyers for Professor James D. Kent of Marist College in Poughkeepsie.

Kent was originally convicted of two counts of promoting a sexual performance of a child and dozens of counts of possessing child pornography (141 total). He was sentenced to one to three years in prison back in 2009.

Two of those counts have now been dismissed.

Those specific counts dealt with the over one hundred images of child pornography stored in his browser's Web cache. (Images in Web caches are saved automatically by the computer — not necessarily downloaded by the user.)

Kent's lawyers argued that, as Kent was not even aware his browser had such a cache, he could not be charged with knowingly "possessing" whatever mysterious images it contained. (Kent himself stated that someone else at the college must have placed the images on his computer.)

The court agreed, ruling that the mere presence of the images in the cache was not definitive proof of Kent's possession. It did not prove that Kent himself had printed, saved or downloaded those pictures.

Those actions, which demonstrate what Judge Carmen Ciparick called "dominion and control over the images," remain very much illegal.